How I Became a Programmer: Part 1

My story begins in a small Mennonite town in Southern Manitoba, a Canadian province dead-center in the middle of North America. It was 1986, and one cold December afternoon my dad came home with a Commodore 64. He had borrowed it from the elementary school, where he was a teacher. My two brothers and I looked with amazement as the machine was set up, and we thumbed through the box of disks. Dig Dug, Ghostbusters, Galaxian, and about 40 more games. We were completely mesmerized. We knew exactly how we'd be spending our Christmas holidays.

This wasn't the first time I had used a computer. My 5th grade teacher was the "AV guy" at my school, and we had an Apple IIe in our classroom. I don't remember much about it, but at the time I instinctively knew that computers were a big deal. There was something about it that was ten times cooler than anything else in the school. "Bank Street Writer" was the name of the word processor we used on the Apple IIe. Anyway, it wasn't until decades later that I learned how revolutionary that computer really was. Steve Wozniak was a genius.

Back to the Commodore 64. Because the computer was such a big hit that Christmas, the following year we got our very own Commodore 64C. The 64C was mostly the same as the original 64, but with a more aerodynamic case. Also, the SID sound chip had only 3 voices instead of the 4 voices of the original.

Stay tuned for Part II!